Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In keeping with Moore's Law, the number of transistors that can be practicably incorporated into an integrated circuit has doubled approximately every two years. This trend has continued for more than half a century and may be expected to continue until at least 2015 or 2020. However, simply adding more transistors to a single-threaded processor no longer produces a significantly faster processor. Instead, increased system performance has been attained by integrating multiple processor cores on a single chip to create a chip multiprocessor, and by sharing processes between the multiple processor cores of the chip multiprocessor. System performance and power usage can be further enhanced with chip multiprocessors that have core elements configured for multiple instruction sets or for handling different subsets of instruction sets.